Not a Fringe Festival (The Hidden Friedman)

To listen to the latest Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld speeches, you’d think that our biggest problem in Iraq is a violent minority of “extremists,” defying the democratic will of the Iraqi people. And you’d think that our biggest problem at home is a misguided group of Democratic appeasers, who want to cut and run in the great totalitarian struggle of the 21st century.

I wish it were so.

So begins Tom Friedman's Friday column, The Central Truth (fully available to Times Select subscribers), which tackles the "central" problem of both sides of the Iraq war (the BushCo administration and the Sunni/Shiite communities in Iraq):

We are stalled in Iraq not because of something some fringe antiwar critics said, or did, but because of how the Bush team, the center of U.S. policy, approached Iraq from the start. While it told the public — correctly, in my view — that building one example of a tolerant, pluralistic, democratizing society in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world was really important in the broader war of ideas against violent radical Islam, the administration acted as though this would be easy and sacrifice-free.

Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld told us we are in the fight of our lives against a new Islamic fascism, and let’s have an unprecedented wartime tax cut and shrink our armed forces. They told us we are in the fight of our lives against a new Islamic fascism, but let’s send just enough troops to topple Saddam — and never control Iraq’s borders, its ammo dumps or its looters. They told us we are in the fight of our lives against a new Islamic fascism, but rather than bring Democrats and Republicans together in a national unity war coalition, let’s use the war as a wedge issue to embarrass Democrats, frighten voters and win elections. They told us we are in the fight of our lives against a new Islamic fascism — which is financed by our own oil purchases — but let’s not do one serious thing about ending our oil addiction.

Donald Rumsfeld demonizes war critics as “morally confused.” But it is the “moral confusion” at the heart of the Bush policy — a confusion between its important ends and insufficient means — that has hobbled us from the start. It truly, truly baffles me why a president who bet so much of his legacy on this project never gave it his best shot and tolerated so much incompetence. He summoned us to D-Day and gave us the moral equivalent of the invasion of Panama.

But there is not only a problem at the center of U.S. policy. We are also failing in Iraq because of what the Shiite and Sunni mainstreams — not the fringes — are tolerating. Democracy fails when centrist forces either won’t stand up to extremists or try to use their violence for their own purposes.

The short history of the Iraq war is that the Sunnis in Iraq, and in the nearby Arab states, refused to accept one man, one vote, because it meant bringing the Shiite majority to power in Iraq for the first time. The Sunni mainstream, not the minority, believes Shiites are lesser Muslims and must never be allowed to rule Sunnis. Early in the Iraq war a prominent Sunni Arab leader said to me privately, “Thomas, these Shiites, they are not real Muslims.”

[...]

The dominant struggle in Iraq today, writes the Iranian-American analyst Vali Nasr in his provocative new book, “The Shia Revival,” is not “the battle of liberty against oppression, but rather the age-old battle of the two halves of Islam, Shias and Sunnis. This is the conflict that Iraq has rekindled, and this is the conflict that will shape its future.”

Just staying the course will not contain it. But before we throw up our hands on Iraq, why not make one more big push to produce a more stable accord between Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds over how to share power and oil revenues and demobilize militias. We still don’t have such an understanding at the center of Iraqi politics. It may not be possible, but without it, neither is a self-sustaining, unified Iraqi democracy.

My Mom recently devoured The Shia Revival and highly recommends it (it'll added to the stack of books on my nghtstand very soon).